It's Monday! New, New Titles!

          Visit Jen at Teach Mentor Texts and Kellee and Ricki at UnleashingReaders to see what they've been reading, along with everyone else who link up.  

       I'm grateful to Candlewick Press for these advanced copies shared today. The Dollar Kids was out just a couple of weeks ago, and the picture books are out early September!

       This story feels so good when one reads it, even during the dark times, but especially in the good times. Lowen Grover, a twelve-year-old who loves to draw comics, and loves to do it alone. Sadly, getting a younger neighbor kid, Abe, out of his hair for a while leads to a terrible shooting of Abe and other kids at the local quick mart. Lowen stops drawing, stumbles across an old mill town that’s giving away homes for a dollar, thus begins Lowen’s idea for an escape from his terrible guilty memories and an opportunity for his entire family to have a new start. 
       This risky journey involves Lowen’s parents and older sister and brother, plus several other families we see trying hard to make entirely new lives work. There’s a lot of learning here through observation of each character, many of whom have their own secret wishes. Even the townspeople who have stuck to the old mill town in its own struggles and who don’t know what to think of these newcomers are filled with varied shades of hopes and needs. Jennifer Richard Jacobson manages to write a story that centers on one boy, but includes the richness of family and community so well that I hated seeing the book come to an end. Ryan Andrews has added special knowledge of Lowen’s comic creations with his own comic illustrations throughout the story. 

        This was a surprise when I opened it, a different look in a picture book, enticing young readers to step inside. It's a chapter book and a graphic picture book in nine parts, a tale of a young dog learning how to be a friend. For younger readers, Rosie wakes up with her master who suggests a walk. In that walk, while gazing at clouds, Rosie feels a bit lonely, but when that same master takes her to a dog park, being lonely doesn't seem like such a bad thing. When she sees so many dogs, all of whom are new to her, she feels a little bit afraid. What happens next shows a few lessons for friendships, the "to do" and the "not to do". In wonderful, realistic illustrations, Harry Bliss tells the tale of Rosie, who is a good dog but doesn't KNOW everything there is to know about friends. In a few words, Kate DiCamillo manages to give us another new book that will bring smiles along with the learning.

         In delightful and colorful illustrations that ride along with lots of questions, a uni (no, a horse) moves along through its day in a red hat. Hmm, why a red hat? And is it hiding something? One must believe and read in order to discover this strange and fun mystery! 

         Being together seems the best thing, even if it's going with Dad and helping with his "Night Job", cleaning a school. A boy and his dad move through the school, mopping and sweeping, doing ordinary things but they are with each other, eating a late dinner, listening to a baseball game where "the sun is shining in a stadium filled with people eating hot dogs and peanuts and drinking lemonade." Karen Hesse has written a loving story while G. Brian Karas illustrates the work in shaded night tones. Sharing a new idea of children who don't spend what many think are everyday evenings will show that differences can be; and for those who spend their own evenings differently, they'll love seeing themselves in this book.

         Published in association with Help Refugees, Nicola Davies shares a poem she wrote when she learned that 3,000 unaccompanied children had been turned away by the U.K. In an author's note, she adds that there are 22.5 million refugees in the world and over half are children. This story/poem tells of a young girl who went to school one morning only to have 'war come' after a few hours. Her town is bombed; her own home destroyed. She is the only one left in her family, so she runs. The story is brief, showing a few pages of the harrowing and continual moves from place to place, camp to camp. Davies writes the girl has only a dirty blanket and a corner with "a door that rattled in the wind". She walks along a street and people ignore her. 
        The heartbreaking moment came to Davies when she read of a child turned away from school because they told her there was no chair for her. What happens at the end both feels very good and still sad to me. A young boy comes to this fictional girl and says he has a chair for her. All of the children, I assume at the camp, are going to school! And they each bring a chair. In soft, I think, watercolors, Rebecca Cobb manages to show the scope of this war, the family in an ordinary day, the child who within hours loses everything, the bleak destruction of a child's life.
          For those many teachers who are trying hard to help students understand the plight of refugees, for those refugees who may be glad that someone is telling their story, this will be that book. 

Now reading: One new arc from Candlewick, ready for a giveaway next week! And one adult book by a Colorado author, Nick Arvin, titled Mad Boy: An account of Henry Phipps in the War of 1812.